Home is where the hearth is, a warming reminder of the past

BACK in March I was summoned home to Lewis, hurtling eagerly north by deserted Highland roads and fading posters for 2019 Highland Games, for my first covid jag.

I had spent six long months ‘shielding’ my elderly parents, without one night’s respite, one meal out or seeing anybody else save the masked, nervous assistants in shops.

Now I unloaded the car, exercised and fed the dogs, and at last set to work – the scrunch of newspaper, the delicate frame of kindling sticks, the first little lumps of coal, the scrape – finally – of a match…

Minutes later I was at long last seated in my own home, all alone, without interruption, gazing into the crackling flames of an open fire. and, in that moment, I thought it the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

There is a skill in setting a fire, one I learned long ago from my grandmother. There is also something profoundly grounding about one.

You may ping dinner through a microwave after hoovering the stairs and stuffing your washing into the Zanussi; spend your day contending with emails, or chat via Zoom with cousins Hank and Elma in deepest alabama.

But when you lay and light a fire, you are doing something your people have done, and in pretty well the same way, for as long as anyone can imagine.

a fire is warmth. It is company. It is the backstage for entertainment; the chair immediately beside it, facing the door, instinctively the seat of honour for the highest guest.

But it has deeper, primal associations. In the dark wild forest of our furthest forebears, a fire afforded real protection against the wolves and bears and lynx that, not really that long ago, still roamed Scotland.

Into living memory, all our cooking was on solid-fuel ranges. Older council houses still, at least in the Western Isles, enjoy hot water from a back-boiler and many of us still spend pleasant spring days winning peats from the hill, setting them up in little wigwams to dry and, in time, courtesy of some kindly neighbour with truck or tractor, hauling them home.

PEAT is free – if you are prepared to put in the hours – and is nicer to handle, and much more aromatic, than coal, though it is not as hot and it leaves a vast volume of ash.

That is the downside of a living fire. There is much dust – from the hearth, the drift of soot (apt to slump down the chimney in heavy rain), from the solid fuel itself and the mess that can be made by an incompetent chimney sweep.

Of course, in the Outer Hebrides the traditional gable-end hearth is actually quite a recent arrival and, as late as 1947, most homes in rural Lewis were traditional thatched blackhouses – drystone walls, a flagstoned but essentially earthen floor and a peat fire in the middle of it, smoke left to escape as it could. The cow was at the other end of the house, coming in and out by the same front door as yourself.

The very last of these dwellings was vacated only in 1982 and you can still visit a beautifully preserved example at arnol, acquired by what is now Historic Environment Scotland in 1964 and where that fire is never allowed to go out – for the fire is the very life of the house.

Without it, the roof would grow cold, sodden – and would start to collapse in a matter of weeks. Every element of the blackhouse is from the ground – the roof of oat-straw and heather-sods and its rafters of driftwood, the gnarled rocks of Lewisian gneiss that form the double walls and the insulation of ash and boulder-clay between them – and the ground is desperate to reclaim them.

as one attendant of the arnol blackhouse remarked in my hearing eight years ago, ‘Is not this how every civilisation begins? africa, Europe, the arctic – it does not matter; it began everywhere with a fire in the middle of the floor.’

and we still have in Edinburgh – in the front garden and, right now, gorgeous with begonias – my great-grandmother’s pan.

Forget Prestige or Le creuset: it is a vast round iron thing on three little legs, fashioned before Edwardian times by the famous carron Iron Works near Falkirk, and fearful children have been known to ask if it is a witch’s cauldron – for that is exactly what it looks like.

By all accounts my greatgrandmother, who lived past 90 and missed my birth by exactly five years, was a formidable lady. She had inherited a croft, in her own name; that was a huge advantage in the local marriage market, where it was said in all earnestness that ‘a woman with a croft could have the pick of anyone’.

She spent most of her latter years in bed, being waited upon hand and foot – and yet, every year, would briskly command my grand-uncle angus where precisely to plant the potatoes on the croft she hadn’t seen in years.

But she was not always the formidable dowager.

SHE had borne ten children, kept immaculate house with little more than a heather besom, and fed her man and brood from that pan – for the most part, porridge, fish and potatoes, with meat on rare occasions and a chicken when there was a feast.

The only other utensil of importance was a girdle, which in the islands is something a woman bakes on, not something she steps into, and on this oatcakes and barley bread were baked over the fire, pot or girdle hooked onto the slabhradh, a heavy iron chain hanging from a roof beam above.

The sheer physical slog of such a life we can barely imagine. Every drop of water had to be carried from the well. all waste water had to be taken outside. Heavy washing, blankets and so on, was done in the local river. and the latest baby had to be tended, and her man and the family fed, and the cow milked and the hens looked after and, on top of it all, her own share of the heavy toil on the croft.

She is long gone, but her pan survives, and many a tale it could doubtless tell.

There is also an irrationality about an open fire, and that is why trends and the law itself are moving against it.

It is a profoundly wasteful, inefficient way of heating a room, and most of the heat goes straight up the chimney. It is also a great danger to very small children. For many years now, the law has decreed that you must have a fixed fireguard if there is an infant in the house – and for more than a decade building regulations have forbidden an open hearth in any new Scottish dwelling.

I am myself saving up just now for a log burner, which in itself is a thing of beauty and, by today’s splendid engineering, is far less wasteful of fuel.

But it will be with mixed feelings; somewhere deep in all of us, especially as the nights draw in and wild things ready to creep unseen in winter’s woods, the living fire is home.